doors that shouldn’t be opened
by Douglas Messerli
Kevin
Smith (screenwriter and director) Chasing
Amy / 1997
In Kevin Smith’s boy loves girl/girl
loves girl/boy loves boy-comedy, nearly all the characters draw and write
cartoons, and are, similarly, treated as cartoons by the writer-director. That
is not to say that there are not pleasing elements in Smith’s slightly-naughty
sexual treatise, and certainly its central actors—Ben Affleck as Holden McNeil,
Joey Lauren Adams as Alyssa Jones, and Jason Lee as Banky Edwards—are engaging.
Although the movie often suggests that the director is questioning closed notions
of sexuality and gender, in the end, because of his character-as-type approach
we wind up with the status-quo, with each returning to their normative
kind—while throughout Smith has gotten away with more gay bashing (both male
gay and lesbian) than the most bigoted of cinematic works.
The film begins, in fact, with a parody of gay male homosexuality, by
presenting a lecture by Black cartoonist Hooper X (Dwight Ewell), who in a
macho-like rant raves against the fact that the cartoon world, including that
of cinematic figures, lacks black heroes. Using the interruptive tactics of his
friends, Holden and Banky, Hooper puts down any possible exceptions to prove
his theory and to reassert his right to be assertive. In fact, Hooper is a
feminized gay man, whose aggression is all a put-on to convince his fans of his
militant correctness. In short, Hooper as a person denigrates Hooper as the
artist, and the duality of that position is behind nearly every figure in
Smith’s gallery of rouges.
Also in league with Hooper is Alyssa Jones, a beautiful woman who
immediately intrigues the somewhat thoughtful Holden. Holden, as his name
suggests, has is a kind of disaffected Holden Caulfield, holding back his life
artistically (his and Banky’s comic-book heroes are titled, intriguingly,
Bluntman and Chronic, characters which may suggest the pairs’ differing
relationships to life: he sees them, as he tells a fan, less like Cheech and
Chong than as Rosencrantz and Gildenstern or Beckett’s Vladimir and
Estragon)—and sexually. In terms of the latter, Holden is an innocent, unaware throughout the early
scenes of the film of Alyssa’s lesbian sexuality, and clueless about his
partner’s closeted love for him—but then Banky isn’t aware totally of his love
for Holden either!
To give Smith credit—or perhaps to give
Joey Lauren Adams, whom Smith was dating at the time, credit—much of the rest
of the film appears to be an inquisition of just what sexual differences mean.
Although Alyssa appears to be a confirmed lesbian—Holden is convinced she has
never been with a man—the two, nonetheless, become close friends, with Holden
ultimately falling head over heels in love with her. Although it may be hard to
comprehend what Holden has found in her that makes her, as he puts it, “the
epitome of everything I have ever looked for in another human being,” we are,
at least, charmed by Adams’ acting, for which she won several awards.
In reaction to Holden’s honesty,
Alyssa gives a rather stunning defense of her sexual choice, strong enough to
convince us, for a moment, that Smith will not take the easy way out,
reiterating, what both Banky and Holden affirm, that all lesbians really need
is the “penetrating” act. Yet Smith lets us down, even if intelligently, by
suddenly having Alyssa reverse her position, embracing Holden and transforming
herself from a die-hard dyke to a “crossover” lover. Her explanation for her
“switch” is even fairly convincing:
And while I was falling for
you I put a ceiling on that, because you “were”
a guy. Until I remembered why
I opened the door to women in the first
place: to not limit the
likelihood of finding that one person who’d
complement me so completely.
So here we are. I was through when
I looked for you. And I feel
justified lying in your arms, ‘cause I got
here on my own terms, and I
have no question there was some place
I didn’t look. And that makes
all the difference.
I too used to believe that, that all people, if they might allow
themselves, could be multi-sexual, gay, straight, even transgender—that we were
born multi-sexual, “multi-genderous,” but were delimited choices by the learned
restrictions of society and family. That last is a “made up” word, of course,
and I no longer believe it’s quite so simple. It is the smugness of Smith’s
assumption that now disconcerts me.
And that is, after all, the issue. Smith
himself, as his persona Silent Bob admits, was raised Catholic. Banky puts it
to Holden in another way: “You’re way too conservative for that girl. She’s
been around and seen things we’ve only read about in a book.
The breakup between the perfect couple
is inevitable. But in the process, at least Holden realizes he can no longer
“hold on.” In a last desperate attempt to enter her world, a world of vast
sexual knowledge of which he is terrorized, he brings Banky and Alyssa
together, proposing that the three of them participate in group sex, thus
allowing the clueless Banky to join him in sex while allowing his equally
clueless self to feel at par, experientially, with the woman he loves. Oddly
enough—or perhaps we should say, predictably—Banky accepts the invitation, but
Alyssa does not, insisting she has already abandoned that in her search for
sexual meaning, and will not play whore for Holden’s predicaments.
There is no possible reconciliation
given Smith’s typological setups. Alyssa returns to lesbianism and her own
comic book versions of reality, Banky takes over the now successful cartoon
series he and Holden had begun.
And who is Amy? She is, as Silent Bob
explains earlier, the woman Holden will be chasing for the rest of his life, a
being of the imagination only. Holden meets his two former friends at another
convention for cartoon-making, giving a copy of his new cartoon series, Chasing
Amy, to his former lover, while acknowledging his former partner, Banky,
with a polite wave, each of them having returned to the place where they had
begun, alone and uncommitted. To her current girlfriend, Alyssa explains away
any of the deep emotions she once might have felt; when asked who she was
talking to, she responds: “Oh, just some guy I knew.” Despite the flirtatious
liberations of Smith’s explorative work, it is finally a terribly conservative
piece of film-making that sadly acknowledges, as Smith has expressed it: “Some
doors shouldn’t be opened.”
That these same characters or variations of them appear in most of
Smith’s films might suggest a kind of continuity of vision, but also reveals
that, in the end, this director doesn’t have much else to say.
Los Angeles, December 11, 2012
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (December
2012).
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